


Ghosts' Stories

by Orichalxos



Category: Ghost Story - Peter Straub
Genre: Abduction, Implied Murder, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Past Violence, angry ghosts, disturbing reinterpretation of canon, hermeneutics of suspicion stuck on pop lit, not the good guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 02:07:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18907327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orichalxos/pseuds/Orichalxos
Summary: The story the Chowder Society wants to tell you talks about uncanny, monstrous, ancient evils.Step back and look at other stories that fit the facts.





	Ghosts' Stories

**Author's Note:**

> CW: everything in Ghost Story, but through a different lens. Murder, abduction and implied murder, domestic violence, and unpleasant looks at the main characters.
> 
> Additional CW: Work in progress. This first draft was done in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings (which should give you a sense of the awful in it) and it needs revision.

There are the facts, there is the story, and there is the truth. The last is hardest to reach. The first is hardest to understand. 

The ghost story you know. There are unfortunate deaths, suicides, accidents. The unfortunate is revealed as the uncanny, and the uncanny extends into the monstrous. The monstrous is defeated, ultimately, by those who can see its real nature. 

The story invites you to look past the unfortunate, the everyday. To see beneath the news reports of murder-suicides, traffic accidents, disappearances, affairs, and see the ghosts linking them all. The surface of Milburn is not to be taken for granted, because there are old horrors here, and this is the story of how we defeated them. Look past the initial reaction, they say, because the ghost story is the true one. Look past the news reports and you’ll see the ghost underneath.

That is the story; the story the Chowder Society tells, the story that Wanderley’s journals tell, the story Peter Barnes keeps in his archive of papers and tapes and clippings. The story tells us that there is a supernatural connection, an ancient evil threaded through them. The same evil manifesting as Mobley, served by Bates, emerging as Galli. Always ready to destroy the town. 

Start with that story. We are reaching for the truth of what happened, and we have to start with the story they tell. 

Now step back with me. Step back and stop looking underneath. Step back and look.

\--

This is the story: A new schoolteacher zeroed in on the most vulnerable children in his care, children who were possibly mentally disabled, definitely sexually abused, and had no living relatives. He made them the focus of his classes, and one night he required them to stay with him in the schoolhouse. In the morning the boy was dead. The schoolmaster moved back home. The girl was forgotten.

This is the story: A man given to paranoia pushed himself to his limits and was ignored by law enforcement until he slaughtered his whole family, then killed himself. 

This is the story: A male professor began an affair with a female graduate student. He was overwhelmed with her sexuality, but after some time he began to be repulsed by her. She began to talk about marriage, about her friends, about interests that he found banal at best and repulsive at worst. His distaste did not stop him from fucking her. 

When she disappeared from her apartment one afternoon he did not report it to the police, or to anyone, but felt a sense of relief. No one asked where she went. Later his brother committed suicide, and though no one remembers the graduate student with his brother at the hotel, he is convinced she was there.

This is the story: An actress disappeared after her older patron died at a party. No one asked where she went. No one found it remarkable. 

This is the story: A secretary disappeared after one of her employers died and the other was injured. No one asked where she went. No one found it remarkable.

This is the story: Another actress disappeared after her older fiancé died. Her disappearance was actually death. She had gone to an apartment where there were five young men who admired her; something happened in that apartment that left her naked and dead from a blow to the head. The five decided to hide the body, conceal the death, and never speak of it again. No one found it remarkable. No one asked where she went.

This is the story: A child named Angie Mitchell, or Angie Maule, was abducted from Milburn. She was targeted because she was a loner on the playground, had few friends, seemed odd. No one asked where she went. No one found it remarkable. Her captor drove her down to Florida, tied her to him while he slept, stood over her with a knife in the night, and  
And  
And

\--

When the facts are laid out like this, they fit the ghost story that Wanderley’s notes tell. They can also fit other stories. That’s the problem with facts; they can have so many underneaths. 

Set some of the different stories against each other and something else emerges. Something possibly close to truth.

For example, Scales can easily be one of thousands of murder-suicides, domestic violence taken to its deadly end. Almost banal for how frequently the same thing happens everywhere else. No need for phantoms deluding him into killing his family; so many men take the shots knowing who they’re shooting, and Scales need not be different. 

Or Alma Mobley. Ann-Veronica Moore. Anne Mostyn They don’t need the ghost story to make drearily familiar sense. Every day people disappear, women disappear, and the questions aren’t asked, or are handwaved away. The sordid little drama of Wanderley’s failed affair is replayed over and over everywhere. Nothing unusual, except perhaps the frequency of it in Milburn. 

Truth won’t be held in narrative, with beginnings and endings, or in facts, with mutable interpretations. Truth can barely be formed into words. Even framing these questions get us closer to truths that are too unwieldy to submit to words alone. 

Questions like: Why is it important for the Chowder Society to believe that Scales was demonically inspired? 

Questions like: Why does Milburn – why do we – find the utter disappearance of so many young women unremarkable?

\--

What about Eva Galli? If we look at the facts, there are many other compelling stories to explain how a beautiful woman surrounded by privileged young men ends up naked, bludgeoned, buried, and erased. 

The Chowder Society, guided by Wanderley's research and theories, protests that there was more to it. She was the extension of something evil into Milburn, something vengeful, and she’d already killed once. She was going to kill again when she stripped and made lewd advances on them. She was going to reveal what she really was. And so when they hit her and she fell, her death was an accident. 

She made us do it, she taunted us into it, they say. And we didn’t do it anyway, she just fell and dashed her brains out. And she was going to drive us mad, so thank god we did it, we had to do it, she made us do it, and we didn’t do it anyway. 

And they hide the body because their lives are worth so much more than one dead woman. 

Another story begs to emerge – one where Galli did not begin as the emanation of evil that had to be eradicated, as a vengeful ghost, but instead ended as one – murdered, violated, abandoned, forgotten, erased. 

What if every woman’s death, every abandoned body, every disappeared beauty, wasn’t the same woman disappearing over and over; what if they were all different people, whose deaths left a residue, an accumulation of murdered lives? Why wouldn’t Milburn be stuffed full to bursting with angry ghosts, new ones renewing the old every time a murderer blames his crime on they made me do it?

No, the notes say. Best to fight evil and defeat it, because it can be defeated. Tackle her before she shapeshifts (and brain her on the fireplace as she goes down). Stab her before she can tempt them with her visions, with immortality, with sex. They had to do it. She made them do it. They didn’t really do it anyway. And they got away with it.

\--

Which brings us to Angie Maule. Where the story is more tangled and the facts are barely visible, with Wanderley’s journals losing coherence toward the end. 

He goes from standing over her with a knife to driving over a cliff , stabbing a cartoonishly racist black man, then slicing up the same shapeshifted evil in the form of a wasp, as it shrieks let me go, let me go, you can’t do this, no no no no no. Victory when it is dead, he writes, my brothers, my humanity. 

Step back again, because this one is going to hurt. Take the facts and see what other stories they may fit.

We know he took Angie with him on that interstate flight. We know he says he stood over her with the knife. 

We know there are so many Jane Does in Panama City, Florida. Bodies left on the beach or washing up on the tide. Bodies in cars crashed into the surf. Bodies in hotel rooms. 

Was it a wasp?

He sliced and stabbed something so viciously that he cut his own hands to ribbons. And killing it filled him with victory and validation.

He severed something that he believed was an ancient evil, something that cried out LET ME GO NO NO NO and wriggled even as he cut it apart. Something. Someone.

There are facts, there are stories, there is truth. The truth that lies under these stories is too unclear and too vast to fit into a single story.

In moments like that, who would not become an angry ghost?

\--

We are not now, nor ever, Eva Galli, Alma Mobley, Angie Maule.  
But in a world where the only truth that comes out of these stories is _they got away with it…_  
Perhaps we ought to be.


End file.
